Meaning and the Trirelative Semiotic Orientation of Language

April 28, 2017

Linguistics is axiomatically an observational science. It pays attention to and analyzes the ontology and the use of language in a triad of respects: (1) language as code, i. e., a set of norms that every speaker inherits when they become members of the community of learners and users; (2) language as inner/personal speech, i. e., the internal communication that occurs between phases of the thinking self; and (3) language as social/external speech, i. e., vocalized communication with interlocutors. In all three of these respects language at any given stage of its development is the cumulative result of its history, i. e., the teleological outcome of past stages.

Expanding these postulates with respect to linguistic meaning, Plato says that “thought and speech are the same; only the former, which is a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself, has been given the special name of thought” (Sophist 263E). Peirce goes one step further and says that “all thought is in signs.” Synthesizing these ideas, we can say that LANGUAGE IS THEINSTRUMENT OF THOUGHTAND OF SPEECH, both, and consists of semeiotic units––SIGNS––that are, furthermore, to be defined as THEPATTERNEDCOLLIGATION OF SOUNDANDMEANING. The epitomical units of language, words, are units of meaning consisting of a sequence of sounds (called PHONEMES) that are associated in the minds of speakers with one or more meanings. A sign is defined, in language more particularly, as (1) anything that is capable of signifying something else (called its OBJECT) and (2) anything capable of being interpreted as signifying the particular meaning(s) intended by the speaker or language user (called its INTERPRETANT).

Philosophers have agonized from time immemorial about the nature of meaning and how to define it. When it comes to language, there is no difficulty because meaning is the object of linguistic signs, alias words. If I utter the sounds “dog” and intend by this sequence to mean the English word for “a small- to medium-sized carnivorous mammal (Canis familiaris synonym Canis lupus familiaris) of the family Canidae,” any interlocutor with a knowledge of English will know what I am referring to. Saying French chien, German Hund, Russian sobaka, or Japanese inu changes nothing as far as the object signified is concerned: they all mean ‘dog’, differing only in linguistic means of expression.

Meaning is often localized as being “in the head” of speakers, but Peirce had a much more profound idea of meaning’s locus: it is everywhere in the universe around us. From this postulate he draws the conclusion that WE ARE IN MEANING, rather than meaning being in us. Since all thought is in signs, the universe is therefore “perfused” by signs, and we are creatures so constructed by evolutionary biology to make sense of our environment and to communicate to ourselves and to our fellow humans what that sense is. Language is, to repeat, both the instrument of thought and the means by which thoughts are communicated through speech (oral and written).

For those readers of this blog who have enough French, much of what is stated apodeictically above can be discerned experientially to be in harmony with the present approach to language in the splendid, path-breaking new book by Nils B. Thelin, L’aspect, le temps et la taxis en français contemporain: Vers une sémantique de la perspective temporelle (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Studia Romanica Upsaliensia 83. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2016), to whom this post is dedicated in token of friendship and esteem.